Reporter’s Notebook: The wisdom of Ned Holland

The cover story in this week’s Pitch ends with a scene that took place in Topeka on March 31.

The Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee was questioning three members of the Kansas Health Policy Authority‘s board of directors, to decide whether the board members should be re-appointed for another term. At the hearing, Kansas state Sen. Jeff Colyer sparred over health-care reform with E.J. “Ned” Holland, Senior Vice President of Human Resources and Communications for Embarq. Afterward, one of the other senators on the committee called it “the best health-care debate” she’d heard.

There’s a reason for that. Holland has been talking about health-care reform for a long time. In fact, his seemingly off-the-cuff jokes about revolution not working in this country — at least for a couple hundred years — and about Americans being “raging incrementalists” were actually parts of a speech he’s given many times.

The first time I heard it, I was at Embarq’s headquarters, sitting in Holland’s tenth-floor corner

office overlooking scenic I-435 and Nall. Holland, the company’s Senior Vice President for Human Resources and Communications, keeps a

big glass jar of peanut M&Ms on his granite conference table.